Enhancing MML clustering using context data with climate applications

Abstract

In Minimum Message Length (MML) clustering (unsupervised classification, mixture modelling) the aim is to infer a set of classes that best explains the observed data items. There are cases where parts of the observed data do not need to be explained by the inferred classes but can be used to improve the inference and resulting predictions. Our main contribution is to provide a simple and flexible way of using such context data in MML clustering. This is done by replacing the traditional mixing proportion vector with a new context matrix. We show how our method can be used to give evidence regarding the presence of apparent long-term trends in climate-related atmospheric pressure records. Akaike Information Criterion (AIC) and Bayesian Information Criterion (BIC) solutions for our model have also been implemented to compare with the MML solution. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2009.